


And She Was A Dragon Named Azula

by Teleportation_Magic



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, Azula needs a hug, Gen, Hurt No Comfort, Ozai (Avatar) Being a Terrible Parent, Ozai (Avatar) is an Asshole, POV Azula (Avatar), Scaled Over AU, but hugging is also a fire hazard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-13
Updated: 2020-03-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:35:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,193
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23126371
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Teleportation_Magic/pseuds/Teleportation_Magic
Summary: "Azula is six when she catches her first cat crow.She catches more, closing her jaws around anything that dares enter the garden as she whirls through the air, and she loves it."Azula and her dragon, throughout the years.
Relationships: Azula & Ozai (Avatar), Azula & Ursa (Avatar), Azula & Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 27
Kudos: 520
Collections: avatar tingz





	And She Was A Dragon Named Azula

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Scaled Over](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20170435) by [MuffinLance](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MuffinLance/pseuds/MuffinLance). 



Azula is six when she catches her first cat crow.

It tries to outfly her, but of course she is faster and she locks her jaw around it. And when it goes limp, she brings it back to Mother, and mother startles, before nuzzling the top of her head and she doesn’t preen but she does enjoy the warm, the soft burst of flame that comes with it.

Azula catches more, closing her jaws around anything that dares enter the garden as she whirls through the air. Zuzu tries to help sometimes, but she loves it, loved catching them and dragging them down with the winds on her wings and her hunter’s eyes. She loved it like she loved little else, the feeling of wings batting against her chest, the freefall the glides into, the nips Zuko gives her time to time. She always bites back, of course, and Mother always stepped in before it got too bad, but Azula found it all fun.

Some days Azula would just glide through the garden, wishing for nothing more than the winds on her tummy and Mother’s warm flames and Zuzu’s indignant squawks.

Azula is eight when Mother disappears.

Well, she says disappear – she really means leaves. She understands what happened – that Azulon died on the same night Mother disappeared on the same night before Zuko was to be murdered – well.

Azula was clever, always had been. It was what made father look at her, and what made him hate Zuko. And yet, Zuko lived.

And that was also not-a-coincidence, so Azula knew that her mother was alive, because there was no better reason for Zuko to live, not after weeks passed and Father could have ordered any number of accidents or assassinations, either mother was alive or Father was considering him for heir, and her couldn’t be because

Azula looks in the mirror, and she focuses on her expression, of smoothing out the wrinkles in her forehead, of taking deep not-gulping breathes.

Azula didn’t focus on her mother, either. Azula didn’t focus on much, not much except everything else, everything that could suit her well.

So when she heard wisps in the air about a nobles daughter to be soon betrothed, and her being caught with someone else? Azula remembered. When titters flew through the palace that one of the maids was been quarrelling with the others? Azula learned their names, their faces, and why. When she heard rumors of one of her father’s advisors skimming a bit – just a bit! – off the treasury, she hunted down every scrap of information before presenting it to father.

He was pleased with her.

She never stopped, because it was useful to know. It was useful for keeping father’s favour and being a good princess and being secure. Not that Azula wasn’t secure, of course she was, but you could never be too safe. Mother had been a princess too, and look what she got?

In fairness, Aula would never be so stupid as to protect Zuzu. But the point still counted.

Azula is nine when she realizes that Zuko’s dragon annoys father.

She thinks she might have been younger when she realized that her’s annoyed father. But she really didn’t shift much after mother left, anyways and it was always a little bit difficult to keep track of things when she was dragon. (She always came to with her dressers full, with rows upon rows of tiny little pins, some gold, some wood, and she always wanted to throw them all out but she _couldn’t_ ).

But when she watches father, carefully, while he watches Zuko the small twists in his expression burn onto her retinas, and she takes even more care to only shift in her room, where there isn’t much space for her dragon, not to fly, but there is enough, and that is good.

When she’s eleven she stops completely, after watching Zuko struggle, shifting from Zuko to dragon to Zuko to dragon while screaming. Azula smiles, smiles knowing that finally, finally the heir and the spare will be just the heir, and Zuko collapses. Not dead, father didn’t kill him and wasn’t that something, especially since she thinks he might like to, with the stupid big scar on her face. Azula remembers to let out a gasp when on of Zuko’s claws fly the Fire Lord, enraged – Zuko had never been clever about himself, not really.

(Was Zuko leverage for her or saved by mother’s leveraging? Azula _doesn’t know._ )

Azula knows that it isn’t complete, that so long as he was still here there was always something she had to excel over, but it extends her head start and that is really all she can ask for.

She does stop her dragon completely. While it is powerfully, dragons can go out of control, and Azula knows her’s is particular to it. She always remembers mother’s flames in that form, licking up her scaly body, and she generally tries to ignore it. It’s annoying, more than anything else, and it makes her a liability and more than all that weak since no matter what she does she can’t control it.

Azula knows that if she goes too out of control her father will stop her, and that makes shame slither down her shoulder along with something else, and she looks in the mirror. (Her face needs but a twitch to go back to joyful.)

And besides, Zuzu’s wild claws had made that clear, even in battle there was no tactical advantage.

Her face is clear.

She starts with an orange flame first, lit by one of the servants that she filches. She’d left it there after leaving to go look after her illegitimate baby, Azula knows that because she’d looked into it when she’d began eating a fair bit more, than stopped abruptly. All the servants had been curious. She sets it on her table and practices, holding her arm and getting closer and closer to the flame. When her dragon starts screaming, she holds her hand still and waits. Waits and holds, and her dragon doesn’t appear. Good.

She waits until the screams die down, until they are nothing but a soft braying. She moves her hands closer. Azula has to be careful not to cause burns on her flesh but it works, she gains more and more control. She sleeps some night, enough that she could still function perfectly if not exceptionally, and eventually, after a week of practice, she can drop the flame on her arm without her dragon crawling out. The wax stings, but she peels it off easily.

Daylight breaks. She slips into her dress and starts moving through the castle, beginning her day.

Before going to bed that night she remembers to test herself again. The dragon roars louder this time, but Azula simply waits, and this time it is easier.

Much, much easier.

When she is thirteen, the roaring gets worse.

She has not shifted once in two years and if she focuses too much there is an ever-present itch on the small of her back. She is practicing her forms when her father grabs her arm, flames on his sleeve. She doesn’t know what it wrong – he looks frustrated, the tiniest bit, and she knows that the next few seconds were important. She merely blinks as he watches her, flames licking at her skin. His head tilts the tiniest bit.

“Your dragon?”

“I put her away. I control her.” Azula is smug when she tells him, and he smiles back.

“Good.” Then he forces her to go through her drills again – this time a little bit faster, a little bit harder, each time. And as she steps she can feels the itching on her skin get worse and worse when her blue flames touch her skin, and Azula feels her foot land slightly off on the last one and she nearly flinches into the ground when she finishes the move. Her father snorts a little.

“Almost perfect Azula. Almost.”

And that is that. Except when her blue flames curl around her palms they makes her skin tingle, they make her skin itch, like she had a coat she forgotten to take off. She went back to her room in the middle of the night with a candle, and let it burn blue, this time.

It took longer. Almost three weeks, though Azula does not let herself skip sleep this time because then father will notice, and that would be… a catastrophe.

But she does control her dragon, eventually – when she does her daily practice, she ends up finally stopping her roars. The slip, from roars to scratches to meek whimpers that itch.

She slays her dragon. Azula is almost proud of herself for doing it.

Her dresser sit on the side, unopened, unburned, gold and wood adorning the insides.

When she is fourteen, she hears of the news that someone is stopping the South, of dragon pelt-makers suddenly going missing, their stocks disappearing and their boats vanishing. She learns that a fair few of these line the Fire Lord’s pockets, so when the same news reaches him, she is sent to investigate.

It doesn’t take long to figure out who it is. Zuko and Iroh meet her halfway, and when she expresses her concerns, they turn on her.

Rude. Iroh leaves to do… something or the other, and Azula turns to Zuzu, smile on her face.

Fire comes to her easily and she sets into a rhythm quickly enough. Zuzu, on the other hand, doesn’t and ironically enough that is what makes the fight tricky – he is a dragon some moments and a human the others. It is a little bit angering to see him struggle with it – she knows that Zuzu as a dragon is the strongest he’ll ever be, so why doesn’t he just give in? His wings flap against the air and she dances quickly across her ship.

It is almost frustrating how much she has to work for it – but she keeps her fight steady, letting her flames shield her from the blast of fire that emits from his throat.

She miscalculated. She miscalculated, she hadn’t expected Iroh and his fire burns through her shield, leaving the blue wisps flying away in the air. She feels them, Zuzu’s bright orange flames, and they should burn her but they are all warm against her face, and they are so familiar in that half a moment that she gasps and chokes and she hasn’t shifted in three years, she hasn’t, but the familiarity is so warm and her guard comes down for a second.

In that moment her not-dead dragon surges and she screams and right before everything goes unknown she sees Zuko’s widening eyes, Iroh’s half step back and almost-fearful almost-disgusted “What have you done to yourself?”

When she comes to, she is holding pins. Hairpins, useless things that they are, and she shoves them into a chest in her room. The gold and the silver and the wood and even some stone ones mix in the chest and the ladies on her ship shoot her odd looks for the rest of the day, and she keeps her back straight. She practices on the deck for the rest of the day, single gold piece jutted next to her bangs just to make them know to stop looking. They do.

Her ship is mostly undamaged. She gets full report and thankfully the don’t even need to dock to complete the necessary repairs. She keeps herself on her feet all day until the sun goes down and she is standing in her small ship-room, with just a mirror and a bed.

What had he said – Zuzu looked startled. That was odd and she needed to know why.

Azula knew she shouldn’t shift, but she needed to know and besides that, she was alone. And more then them both, there was information there that could be, was maybe vital.

This is the one time she and her dragon work in tandem in what feels like the first time in forever. And she stretches out across the room, and she thinks she should have outgrown it by now, but oh well. She might have not – it’s not her fault that her dragon was weak.

She freezes when her dragon comes into view.

The mirror is horrifying.

The pelt it the first thing she notices. It is gnarled, with molts on top of molts fused together, with not a little of it sticking to her skin. Her legs are slightly bent, and she knows just by looking at them that they are wrong, and her teeth are shaped _wrong_.

They saw her _like this._

She isn’t – it isn’t ugly so much as wrong, misshapen, legs and wings twisted. Her molts – they’re broken. Everything is broken and she almost cracks the mirror before she gets a hold of… everything.

She shifts back.

She looks in the mirror. Her face is smooth. Her eyes close, before opening again and she turns.

It doesn’t matter. The dragon is useless anyways. Why would she care if it was a little bit more?

**Author's Note:**

> I come with my small offering to the temple of Muffin. Because the concept that repressing your dragon is a Really Bad Idea is one that won't get out of my head, especially with Azula and I had to write it. I had to. 
> 
> I am now going to make my exit.  
> *bows* *leaves* *runs* *flamingchildiscomingRUN*


End file.
